October Surprise

see lie power any means

refers to several attempts:

merri ok

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10 24 milley kelly fascist to the core

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maybe premATURE, 1 DAY?

Newspaper front pages continue to bury Trump’s former chief-of-staff saying the former president is a fascist who praised Hitler

Only the Los Angeles Times focused a front-page article on John Kelly describing Trump as “the general definition of fascist” and saying he praised Hitler. The New York Times buried its own scoop.

Written by Courtney Hagle

Published 10/24/24 12:33 PM MMA

This week, The New York Times reported that former President Donald Trump’s former chief-of-staff John Kelly said Trump is a fascist, that he has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler, and that he repeatedly denigrated soldiers and the military. The Los Angeles Times was the only one of five top U.S. newspapers to focus a front-page article on Kelly’s comments, while the Times continued to bury its own scoop.

The Times’ report, drawn from multiple interviews with Kelly, marked Kelly’s most extensive on-the-record comments about Trump. He detailed Trump’s “dictator approach to government” and concerning disregard for the Constitution, confirmed that Trump has made disparaging comments about the military and wounded soldiers, and spoke about Trump claiming that “Hitler did some good things.”

As Media Matters reported yesterday, the morning after the story broke, it was not covered on the print front pages of The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, or The New York Times.

Today, the story was adequately covered only on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, with the headline “Ex-aide: Trump is unfit, ‘fascist’.” The Washington Post discussed the comment in a piece focused on Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris calling out Trump, titled “Harris, in escalation, calls Trump a fascist.” As journalist Adam Serwer noted, the frame served to position Kelly’s comments as an “aside in a bigger story framed as a partisan attack by his rival.”

The Wall Street Journal and USA Today did not cover the news on their front pages at all. Neither did The New York Times, which placed its own reporting on A12 of today’s print edition. [PIX OF FT PAGES]

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cbg? bannon?

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an 1 24 no lnx

The 56-year-long crisis of treasonous & illegitimate GOP presidents is happening again

Thom Hartmann

January 27, 2024

Once again, America and the world are watching with horror as a Republican candidate for president — just to win an election — manipulates world affairs in a way that will cause widespread death and destruction while damaging the interests and reputation of America.

There’s a long tradition of Republicans running for president committing what can best called treason, or at least criminal manipulation of international affairs, to advantage themselves and hurt incumbent Democratic presidents.

Yesterday, Mitch McConnell let the proverbial cat out of the bag. A bipartisan group of senators had been working on a bill to provide funding to Ukraine and Israel, with money for the southern border, and when it looked like they were going to produce something that would actually pass the House and Senate, Donald Trump inserted himself, telling the Republicans they should kill the bill.

Trump apparently wants to run on chaos at the border, and solving the problem as this legislation is intended to do would take that issue away from him. But he’s also explicitly opposed to any further US aid to Ukraine. This is a treasonous twofer, putting Trump’s election above the interests of the United States and world peace.

Trump, of course, knows that if it weren’t for Putin’s intervention in the 2016 election, he never would have been president. And he desperately needs a repeat to hold onto his fortune and stay out of jail: he’s in a far greater bind now than when he first ran for president as a hustle to get GE to pay him more for his TV show.

His 2016 Campaign Manager Paul Manafort, after all, admitted that during that election he was handing secret internal campaign polling and strategy information off to Russian intelligence, so they could successfully use it to micro-target vulnerable voters via Facebook, an effort that reached 26 million targeted Americans in 6 swing states.

Now, Trump wants Putin’s help again for 2024. He knows that Putin can do things from overseas, including using deepfakes and posing as Americans to spread explicit lies on social media, that would send people to prison for election interference if done here in the US.

Putin’s number one goal, of course, is to seize control of Ukraine while destabilizing western democracies. So, Trump, wanting Putin’s help, is now trying to deliver Ukraine to Putin by killing US aid.

This pattern of Republican presidential candidates criminally intervening in foreign policy just to win elections started in 1968 and has been a feature — not a bug — of every Republican president who succeeded in taking the White House since: it’s time to seriously discuss the five-decade-long problem we have with treasonous and illegitimate GOP presidents.

It started in 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson was desperately trying to end the Vietnam war. It had turned into both a personal and political nightmare for him, and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who was running for President in the election that year against a “reinvented” Richard Nixon.

Johnson spent most of late 1967 and early 1968 working back-channels to North and South Vietnam, and by the summer of 1968 had a tentative agreement from both for what promised to be a lasting peace deal they’d both sign that that fall.

But Richard Nixon knew that if he could block that peace deal, it would kill VP Hubert Humphrey’s chances of winning the 1968 election. So, Nixon sent envoys from his campaign to talk to South Vietnamese leaders to encourage them not to attend upcoming peace talks in Paris.

Nixon promised South Vietnam’s corrupt politicians that he’d give them a personally richer deal when he was President than LBJ could give them then.

The FBI had been wiretapping South Vietnam’s US agents and told LBJ about Nixon’s effort to prolong the Vietnam War. Thus, just three days before the 1968 election, President Johnson phoned the Republican Senate leader, Everett Dirksen, (you can listen to the entire conversation here):

President Johnson: Some of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the [South Vietnamese] president that if he’ll hold out ’til November 2nd they could get a better deal. Now, I’m reading their hand. I don’t want to get this in the campaign. And they oughtn’t to be doin’ this, Everett. This is treason.

Sen. Dirksen: I know.

Those tapes were only released by the LBJ library in the past decade, and that’s Richard Nixon who Lyndon Johnson was accusing of treason.

At that point, for President Johnson, it was no longer about getting Humphrey elected. By then Nixon’s plan had already worked and Humphrey was being wiped out in the polls because the war was ongoing.

Instead, Johnson was desperately trying to salvage the peace talks to stop the death and carnage as soon as possible. He literally couldn’t sleep.

In a phone call to Nixon himself just before the election, LBJ begged him to stop sabotaging the peace process, noting that he was almost certainly going to win the election and inherit the war anyway. Instead, Nixon publicly said LBJ’s efforts were “in shambles.”

But South Vietnam had taken Nixon’s deal and boycotted the peace talks, the war continued, and Nixon won the White House thanks to it.

An additional twenty-two thousand American soldiers, and an additional million-plus Vietnamese died because of Nixon’s 1968 treason, and he left it to Jerry Ford to end the war and evacuate American soldiers.

Nixon was never held to account for that treason, and when the LBJ library released the tapes and documentation long after his and LBJ’s deaths it was barely noticed by the American press.

Gerald Ford, who succeeded Nixon, was never elected to the White House (he was appointed to replace VP Spiro Agnew, after Agnew was indicted for decades of taking bribes), and thus would never have been President had it not been for Richard Nixon’s treason. He pardoned Nixon.

Next up was Ronald Reagan.

During the Carter/Reagan election battle of 1980, then-President Carter had reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr to release the fifty-two hostages held by students at the American Embassy in Tehran.

Bani-Sadr was a moderate and, as he explained in an editorial for The Christian Science Monitor, successfully ran for President of Iran that summer on the popular position of releasing the hostages:

“I openly opposed the hostage-taking throughout the election campaign…. I won the election with over 76 percent of the vote…. Other candidates also were openly against hostage-taking, and overall, 96 percent of votes in that election were given to candidates who were against it [hostage-taking].”

Carter was confident that with Bani-Sadr’s help, he could end the embarrassing hostage crisis that had been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in November of 1979.

But behind Carter’s back, the Reagan campaign worked out a deal with the leader of Iran’s radical faction — Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini — to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 Presidential election. Khomeini needed spare parts for American weapons systems the Shah had purchased for Iran, and Reagan was happy to promise them.

This is the story that was finally confirmed just last year with The New York Times’ reporting that we now know how the deal was conveyed to the Ayatollah and by whom, including the lieutenant governor of Texas.

This was the second modern-day act of treason by a Republican wanting to become president.

The Reagan campaign’s secret negotiations with Khomeini — the so-called “Iran/Contra October Surprise” — sabotaged President Carter’s and Iranian President Bani-Sadr’s attempts to free the hostages.

As President Bani-Sadr told The Christian Science Monitor in March of 2013:

“After arriving in France [in 1981], I told a BBC reporter that I had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and Reaganism.

“Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”

And Reagan’s treason — just like Nixon’s treason — worked perfectly.

The Iran hostage crisis continued and torpedoed Jimmy Carter’s re-election hopes. And the same day Reagan took the oath of office — to the minute, as Reagan put his hand on the bible, by way of Iran’s acknowledging the deal — the American hostages in Iran were released.

Keeping his side of the deal, Reagan began selling the Iranians weapons and spare parts in 1981, and continued until he was busted for it in 1986, producing the so-called “Iran/Contra” scandal.

But, like Nixon, Reagan was never held to account for the criminal and treasonous actions that brought him to office. Which is one reason Bush Jr. and Trump believed they could get away with anything.

After Reagan — Bush senior was elected — but like Jerry Ford — Bush was really only President because he served as Vice President under Reagan. And, of course, the naked racism of his Willie Horton ads helped boost him into office.

The criminal investigation into Iran/Contra came to a head with independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh subpoenaing President George HW Bush after having already obtained convictions for Weinberger, Ollie North and others.

And Walsh was now looking into actual criminal activity by Bush himself in support of the Iran/Contra October Surprise.

Bush’s attorney general, Bill Barr, suggested he pardon them all to kill the investigation and protect himself, which Bush did.

The screaming headline across the New York Times front page on December 25, 1992, said it all: “BUSH PARDONS 6 IN IRAN AFFAIR, AVERTING A WEINBERGER TRIAL; PROSECUTOR ASSAILS ‘COVER-UP’”

And if the October Surprise hadn’t hoodwinked voters in 1980, you can bet Bush senior would never have been elected in 1988. That’s four illegitimate Republican presidents.

Which brings us to George W. Bush, the man who was given the White House by five right-wing justices on the Supreme Court.

In the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000 that stopped the Florida recount — and thus handed George W. Bush the presidency — Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his opinion:

“The counting of votes … does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election.”

Apparently, denying the presidency to Al Gore, the guy who actually won the most votes in Florida and won the popular vote nationwide by over a half-million, did not constitute “irreparable harm” to Scalia or the media.

And apparently it wasn’t important that Scalia’s son worked for a law firm that was defending George W. Bush before the high court (with no Scalia recusal).

Just like it wasn’t important to mention that Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife worked on the Bush transition team — before the Supreme Court shut down the recount in Florida — and was busily accepting resumes from people who would serve in the Bush White House if her husband stopped the recount in Florida…which he did. (No Thomas recusal, either.)

More than a year after the election a consortium of newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today did their own recount of the vote in Florida — manually counting every vote in a process that took almost a year — and concluded that Al Gore did indeed win the presidency in 2000.

As the November 12th, 2001 article in The New York Times read:

“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won.”

That little bit of info was slipped into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story so that it would attract as little attention as possible because the 9/11 attacks had happened just weeks earlier and journalists feared that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush actually lost the election would further hurt a nation already in crisis.

To compound the crime, Bush could only have gotten as close to Gore in the election as he did because his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, had ordered his Secretary of State, Kathrine Harris, to purge at least 57,000 mostly-Black voters from the state’s voter rolls just before the election. Thousands of African Americans showed up to vote and were turned away from the polls in that election in Florida that Bush “won” by fewer than 600 votes.

The simple reality is that Al Gore won Florida in 2000, won the national popular vote by a half-million, and five Republicans on the Supreme Court denied him the presidency.

Florida Governor and George W. Bush’s brother Jeb had his Secretary of State, Kathryn Harris, throw thousands of African Americans off the voting rolls just before the election but then — when the votes had come in and it was clear former Vice President Al Gore had still won — she invented a brand new category of ballots for the 2000 election: “Spoiled.”

As The New York Times reported a year after the 2000 election when the consortium of newspapers they were part of finally recounted all the ballots:

“While 35,176 voters wrote in Bush’s name after punching the hole for him, 80,775 wrote in Gore’s name while punching the hole for Gore. [Florida Secretary of State] Katherine Harris decided that these were ‘spoiled’ ballots because they were both punched and written upon and ordered that none of them should be counted.

“Many were from African American districts, where older and often broken machines were distributed, causing voters to write onto their ballots so their intent would be unambiguous.”

George W. Bush “won” the election by 537 votes in Florida, because the statewide recount — which would have revealed Harris’s crime and counted the “spoiled” ballots, handing the election to Gore (who’d won the popular vote by over a half-million nationwide) — was stopped when George HW Bush appointee Clarence Thomas became the deciding vote on the Supreme Court to block the recount order from the Florida Supreme Court.

Harris’ decision to not count the 45,599 more votes for Gore than Bush was completely arbitrary: there was no legal category and no legal precedent, outside of the old Confederate states simply refusing to count the votes of Black people, to justify it.

The intent of the voters was unambiguous. And the 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court jumped in to block the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court (in violation of the 10th Amendment) just in time to prevent those “spoiled” votes from being counted, cementing Bush’s illegitimate presidency.

So, for the third time in 4 decades, Republicans took the White House under illegitimate electoral circumstances. Even President Carter was shocked by the brazenness of that one. And Jeb Bush and the GOP were never held to account for that crime against democracy.

To get re-elected in 2004, Bush used an old trick: become a “wartime president.” In 1999, when George W. Bush decided he was going to run for president in the 2000 election, his parents hired Mickey Herskowitz to write the first draft of Bush’s autobiography, A Charge To Keep.

Although Bush had gone AWOL for about a year during the Vietnam war and was thus apparently no fan of combat, he’d concluded (from watching his father’s “little 3-day war” with Iraq) that being a “wartime president” was the most consistently surefire way to get reelected and have a two-term presidency.

“I'll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker in 2004.

“One of the things [Bush] said to me,” Herskowitz said, “is: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait) and he wasted it.

“[Bush] said, ‘If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency.’”

Bush lying us into that war was an act of treason against America that cost 900,000 Iraqi lives, over 7,000 American lives (on the battlefield: veterans are still committing suicide daily), and over $8 trillion added to the national debt.

But it did what it was supposed to do: it got Bush re-elected in 2004.

Which brings us to this year’s election.

In 2016, Trump ally Kris Kobach and Republican Secretaries of State across the nation used Interstate Crosscheck to purge millions of legitimate voters — most people of color — from the voting rolls just in time for the Clinton/Trump election.

Meanwhile, Russian oligarchs and the Russian state, and possibly pro-Trump groups or nations in the Middle East, are alleged to have funded a widespread program to flood social media with pro-Trump, anti-Clinton messages from accounts posing as Americans, as documented by Robert Mueller’s investigation.

It was so blatant that it provoked the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of their similar actions during the 2020 election (done while Trump was still president but released in March, 2021) pretty much declaring Trump a “Russian asset.”

It was a repeat, in many ways (albeit unsuccessful this time) of the Russian efforts in 2016. Then, as mentioned, Republican campaign data on the 2016 election, including which states needed a little help via phony influencers on Facebook and other social media, was not only given to Konstantin Kilimnik by Paul Manafort, but Kilimnik transferred it to Russian intelligence.

And now Trump is trying to exacerbate a crisis on our southern border and screw Ukraine in a way that will lead to mass causalities and disrupt the international order — all to give Putin what he wants — the same way Nixon used Vietnam, Reagan used Iran, and Bush used Iraq, just to win a damn election.

While we can’t rewrite history, at least we can try to prevent it from being repeated. Call your members of Congress — your representative and both your senators — and let them know if you agree that Ukraine aid and resolving the issue at the southern border shouldn’t be held hostage to Trump’s need for Putin’s help and approval.

The number for the congressional switchboard is: 202-224-3121.

It’s way past time that America ceased to be the dog wagged by the tail of corrupt Republicans who want to be president.

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no lnx

They sabotaged Carter, too

From Reagan to Trump, treason is optional.

Editorial Board

I said Friday the best way to understand Donald Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin is to think of the former as the leader of a totally made up confederacy and the latter as the leader in a totally made up presidency, who are together in league against the real America.

Trump’s confederacy of the mind and spirit is what I call Realamerica, not to be confused with the real America. Realamericans live there according to God’s law, which demands that white Christian men be on top of society. In Realamerica, the US Constitution was handed down by God, and the real America should stay the same as it was at its founding. The goal of Realamericans is the domination or sabotage of the real America in which their makebelieve confederacy exists.

Most of us believe that the possibility of the indictment of a former president would be the exception to the rule. But what is the rule when Realamericans reserve the right to commit treason when the real America (a democratic majority) denies their right to rule?

For Putin, the best way of winning the war in Ukraine is for a Trump victory in 2024. For Trump, the best way to win the presidency of the real America, and therefore escape criminal accountability, is to keep partnering with Putin in an attempted repeat of the 2016 election. I called this pact the Russo-Realamerican alliance. A hostile foreign government hopes to destabilize the real America from the inside, for the purpose of destabilizing European democracies, and the leader of an imaginary confederacy inside that real country wants to help.

Since Friday, two things have occurred to underscore my thesis. One, the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest on charges of war crimes related to his country’s invasion of democratic Ukraine. Two, Trump said Sunday he expected to be arrested in connection with a hush-money investigation involving Stormy Daniels. Trump called for mass “protests,” as he did on January 6, 2021.

Not only do these men hold illegitimate power. Not only do they use that illegitimate power to attack, erode and undermine legitimate national governments, like the one in Ukraine and like the one here in the real America. They are outside generally accepted boundaries of the law. They are inauthentic. They are lawless. They are criminal.

Yet we face the prospect of another Trump candidacy. You’d think the Republicans, as rah rah as they are, would have a problem with a candidate openly in league with a hostile foreign government. You’d think they’d reject Trump as the 2024 nominee. But all things being equal, though he may be indicted for crimes committed in New York state, Donald Trump will likely win the Republican nomination.

I put it like this, because for mostpeople, it’s difficult to understand how a former president could ever side with Vladimir Putin, who has gone to war with a fellow democratic state (Ukraine) and who threatens the long enlightened project of the European Union.

By thinking of Donald Trump as the leader of a makebelieve confederacy, which exhibits nearly all the same attributes of the former Confederate States of America, we overcome the disbelief that’s associated with a former president siding with the enemy.

Trump was illegitimate then, as the president of a real country (America). He’s illegitimate now, as the president of a fake country (Realamerica). In neither does Trump ask for the consent of the government for the purpose of governing in their name. In both, he, like Putin, expects loyalty to him above all, even the rule of law.

There’s another reason why I say this confederacy of the mind and spirit is a “nation” inside a real nation – so that normal people can see the United States is not a united nation, never has been, and the United States, in a very real sense, is as fictional as Trump’s confederacy of the mind and spirit. The United States did not emerge organically. They were imagined into being. The difference is that the confederacy is illegal and unmade, the union is legal and made.

The difference is mostpeople chose the latter over the former.

Somepeople, which is to say the inhabitants of Realamerica, will never accept the real America. It would be the end for them if they did. To them, truth, justice, equality and liberty for everyone means robbing them of the same. As long as the real America plays by the rules of Realamerica, all is well. But if the real America does not obey, then Realamericans are free to take the law into their own hands. They are free to sabotage, even destroy, what they cannot control.

The Times reported over the weekend that Jimmy Carter’s reelection campaign was sabotaged by a group of Texas Republicans. Carter struggled, right up to Election Day, with a crisis involving American hostages in Iran. These Realamericans, as I’d call them, went to Iran to say that a Republican president would offer them a better deal. The hostages were released, but only after Ronald Reagan’s victory.

The Times report has one source, a witness to the conspiracy, whose story was corroborated by others not involved. Whether the trip made the difference for Carter is hard to say. That the trip happened at all, however, illustrates my point – that there exists an imaginary “nation” inside this real nation. Its inhabitants are dedicated to the cause of domination and control. If they can’t control, they destroy.

It’s God’s law.

Which happens to be whatever Realamericans say.

http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/gop-fraud-and-treason

People are wondering out loud about the parallels between today’s Republican Party and organized crime, and whether “Teflon Don” Trump will remain unscathed through his many scandals, ranging from interactions with foreign oligarchs to killing tens of thousands of Americans by denying them healthcare to stepping up the destruction of our environment and public lands.

History suggests – even if treason can be demonstrated – that, as long as he holds onto the Republican Party (and Fox News), he’ll survive it intact. And he won’t be the first Republican president to commit high crimes to get and stay in office.

In fact, Eisenhower was the last legitimately elected Republican president we’ve had in this country.

Since Dwight Eisenhower left the presidency in 1961, six different Republicans have occupied the Oval Office.

And every single one of them - from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump - have been illegitimate - ascending to the highest office in the land not through small-D democratic elections - but instead through fraud and treason.

(And today’s GOP-controlled Congress is arguably just as corrupt and illegitimate, acting almost entirely within the boundaries set by an organized group of billionaires.)

Let’s start at the beginning with Richard Nixon.

In 1968 - President Lyndon Johnson was desperately trying to end the Vietnam war.

But Richard Nixon knew that if the war continued - it would tarnish Democrat (and Vice President) Hubert Humphrey’s chances of winning the 1968 election.

So Nixon sent envoys from his campaign to talk to South Vietnamese leaders to encourage them not to attend an upcoming peace talk in Paris.

Nixon promised South Vietnam’s corrupt politicians that he would give them a richer deal when he was President than LBJ could give them then.

LBJ found out about this political maneuver to prolong the Vietnam war just 3 days before the 1968 election. He phoned the Republican Senate leader Everett Dirksen – here’s an excerpt (you can listen to the entire conversation here /maxresdefault.jpg)):

President Johnson:

Some of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the [South Vietnamese] president that if he'll hold out 'til November the second they could get a better deal. Now, I'm reading their hand, Everett. I don't want to get this in the campaign.

And they oughtn't to be doin' this. This is treason.

Sen. Dirksen:I know.

Those tapes were only released by the LBJ library in the past decade, and that’s Richard Nixon that Lyndon Johnson was accusing of treason.

But by then - Nixon’s plan had worked.

South Vietnam boycotted the peace talks - the war continued - and Nixon won the White House thanks to it. As a result, additional tens of thousands of American soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians, died as a result of Nixon’s treason.

And Nixon was never held to account for it.

Gerald Ford was the next Republican.

After Nixon left office the same way he entered it - by virtue of breaking the law - Gerald Ford took over.

Ford was never elected to the White House (he was appointed to replace VP Spiro Agnew, after Agnew was indicted for decades of taking bribes), and thus would never have been President had it not been for Richard Nixon’s treason.

The third was Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980.

He won thanks to a little something called the October Surprise - when his people sabotaged then-President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to release American hostages in Iran.

According to Iran’s then-president, Reagan’s people promised the Iranians that if they held off on releasing the American hostages until just after the election - then Reagan would give them a sweet weapons deal.

In 1980 Carter thought he had reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr over the release of the fifty-two hostages held by radical students at the American Embassy in Tehran.

Bani-Sadr was a moderate and, as he explained in an editorial for The Christian Science Monitor earlier this year, had successfully run for President on the popular position of releasing the hostages:

"I openly opposed the hostage-taking throughout the election campaign.... I won the election with over 76 percent of the vote.... Other candidates also were openly against hostage-taking, and overall, 96 percent of votes in that election were given to candidates who were against it [hostage-taking]."

Carter was confident that with Bani-Sadr's help, he could end the embarrassing hostage crisis that had been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in November of 1979. But Carter underestimated the lengths his opponent in the 1980 Presidential election, California Governor Ronald Reagan, would go to win an election.

Behind Carter's back, the Reagan campaign worked out a deal with the leader of Iran's radical faction - Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini - to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 Presidential election.

This was nothing short of treason. The Reagan campaign's secret negotiations with Khomeini - the so-called "October Surprise" - sabotaged Carter and Bani-Sadr's attempts to free the hostages. And as Bani-Sadr told The Christian Science Monitor in March of 2013:

After arriving in France [in 1981], I told a BBC reporter that I had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and Reaganism.

Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the “October Surprise,” which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.

And Reagan’s treason - just like Nixon’s treason - worked perfectly.

The Iran hostage crisis continued and torpedoed Jimmy Carter's re-election hopes.

And the same day Reagan took the oath of office - almost to the minute, by way of Iran’s acknowledging the deal - the American hostages in Iran were released.

And for that, Reagan began selling the Iranians weapons and spare parts in 1981, and continued until he was busted for it in 1986, producing the so-called "Iran Contra" scandal.

But, like Nixon, Reagan was never held to account for the criminal and treasonous actions that brought him to office.

After Reagan - Bush senior was elected - but like Gerry Ford - Bush was really only President because he served as Vice President under Reagan.

If the October Surprise hadn’t hoodwinked voters in 1980 - you can bet Bush senior would never have been elected in 1988. That's four illegitimate Republican presidents.

And that brings us to George W. Bush, the man who was given the White House by five right-wing justices on the Supreme Court....

alternet 2013 r parry consortium

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/heres-what-real-political-cover-looks-orchestrated-right-wingers-who-know-it

...

refers to iran contra coverup? newsweek

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ref

https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Global-Viewpoint/2013/0305/Argo-helps-Iran-s-dictatorship-harms-democracy/(page)/2

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc1jIOPxWrs#t=680 thom h rmn stalled VN lbj had proof, another 30kia US

Piercing the shadowy netherworld of international espionage, Sick has written one of the most controversial and disturbing accounts of political intrigue to appear in recent years.In 1980, William Casey, then campaign manager of the Reagan-Bush ticket, without the knowledge or approval of the legitimate government, arranged a deal with the Iranian government that in return for military equipment, the Iranians would not release the 52 American hostages until Ronald Reagan was safely inaugurated.Sick offers no proof, nor does he try to, that George Bush took part in these talks, or that Reagan was aware of this international scam. What is critical and potentially devastating is that a party out of power subverted the democratic process for gain. Sick, with impeccable credentials as one of America's leading authorities on Iran, presents a thoroughly documented, convincing appraisal of what he describes as nothing less than a political coup. Highly recommended for current affairs collections

amazon rev:

It is easy to tell who has read this book, and who was sent by a certain self-important talk-radio host to try to discredit it with 1-star criticisms -- without ever having opened the book.

Those who say the book claims George H.W. Bush flew to Paris on an SR-71 have fallen for the Big Lie. It most emphatically does NOT say that (that claim actually comes from a similarly-titled book by Barbara Honegger).

What Gary Sick *does* say, on page 223, is this: "In the absence of convincing corroboration, however, I have reserved judgment. For example, several reports have surfaced claiming that vice-presidential candidate George Bush was present at least briefly in Paris during the course of negotiations in October. I have always been uncomfortable about this allegation. [...] I was also aware that the allegation about Bush might have been deliberately floated in order to discredit the story."

And what is this "story" that so needed discrediting? What negotiations were taking place in Paris during October of 1980?

This book presents a sober, convincing and very carefully-documented case that members of Ronald Reagan's transition team -- led by William Casey, Reagan's campaign manager and future head of the CIA -- met on October 19, 1980 with representatives of the Iranian government and various intermediaries and arms dealers. Their purpose? To trade arms and frozen assets for a promise that the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini would continue to hold the American hostages, seized in a raid on the American Embassy almost a year earlier, until AFTER the US presidential elections in November.

As it turned out, the hostages were released just minutes after Reagan was inaugurated January 20, 1981.

The imprisonment of these 52 American hostages was lengthened by at least 177 days for the sole purpose of ensuring a Reagan victory in the elections.

Reagan was later revealed (in 1986, the "Iran-Contra Affair") to have traded arms to the Iranians, in direct contravention of the arms embargo, in order to fund the Nicaraguan Contras, in direct contravention of the Congressional ban on such funding (The Boland Amendment).

These are the facts. They are not in dispute.

The Paris negotiations are particularly important because Ronald Reagan was not president at the time, and had no power to negotiate with foreign governments. In fact the Carter Administration had laid down a rule that there would be "no negotiating with hostage-takers." That was official US policy.

However, by fall of 1980 the Iranians were publicly signaling their willingness to release the hostages. The deposed Shah, whose return had been the only condition of the hostage-takers, had died of cancer in Egypt in July. On September 22, at the urging of the Reagan Administration, Saddam Hussein had invaded Iran. Khomeini was therefore desperate to resume delivery of spare parts for Iran's American-made military equipment, already ordered and paid for under the Shah's regime. Carter was in a supreme bargaining position.

Enter Reagan. He promised to resume arms sales (through Israel), to unfreeze the Shah's assets, to support Iran in their fight against Iraq -- all if Khomeini would deny Carter the public relations benefit of a hostage release just before the election. All if Khomeini would continue to hold the hostages -- until AFTER the US election.

This was strictly against official US foreign policy, of course.

And that makes it treason.

For his part, Khomeini released the hostages a mere *20 minutes* after Reagan's inaugural speech in an apparent attempt to discredit Reagan and expose the illegal deal -- but Reagan's team spun this as Khomeini being afraid of Reagan and the press bought the story. Then came Iran-Contra of course.

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wiki

1980 Carter vs. Reagan[edit source | editbeta]

Main article: October surprise conspiracy theory

In the 1980 presidential election, Republican challenger Ronald Reagan feared that a last-minute deal to release American hostages held in Iran might earn incumbent Jimmy Carter enough votes to win re-election.^[7][8] As it happened, in the days prior to the election, press coverage was consumed with the Iranian government's decision—and Carter's simultaneous announcement—that the hostages would not be released until after the election.^[8]

It was first written about in a Jack Anderson article in the Washington Post in the fall of 1980, in which he alleged that the Carter administration was preparing a major military operation in Iran for rescuing U.S. hostages in order to help him get reelected. Subsequent allegations surfaced against Reagan alleging that his team had impeded the hostage release to negate the potential boost to the Carter campaign.^[9]

After the release of the hostages on January 20, 1981, mere minutes after Reagan's inauguration, some charged that the Reagan campaign had made a secret deal with the Iranian government whereby the Iranians would hold the hostages until after Reagan was elected and inaugurated.^[8]

Gary Sick, member of the National Security council under Presidents Ford and Carter (before beingrelieved of his duties mere weeks into Reagan's term)^[10] made the accusation in a New York Times editorial^[11] in the run-up to the 1992 election. The initial bipartisan response from Congress was skeptical: House Democrats refused to authorize an inquiry, and Senate Republicans denied a $600,000 appropriation for a probe.

Eight former hostages also sent an open letter demanding an inquiry in 1991.^[11] In subsequent Congressional testimony, Sick said that the popular media had distorted and misrepresented the accusers, reducing them to "gross generalizations" and "generic conspiracy theorists." Sick penned a book on the subject and sold the movie rights to it for a reported $300,000.^[12] His sources and thesis were contested by a number of commentators on both sides of the aisle.^[13][14]

Bani-Sadr, the former President of Iran, has also stated "that the Reagan campaign struck a deal with Teheran to delay the release of the hostages in 1980," asserting that "by the month before the American Presidential election in November 1980, many in Iran's ruling circles were openly discussing the fact that a deal had been made between the Reagan campaign team and some Iranian religious leaders in which the hostages' release would be delayed until after the election so as to prevent President Carter's re-election"^[15] He repeated the charge in "My Turn to Speak: Iran, the Revolution & Secret Deals with the U.S."^[16][17]

Two separate congressional investigations looked into the charges, both concluding that there was no plan to seek to delay the hostages' release.^[8] At least three books have argued the case.^[18]

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hmm

al martin raw/

(PRWEB)December 15, 2000

Writing in his column, "Behind the Scenes in the Beltway," government whistle-blower Al Martin reminds his readers that an old October Surprise operative, C. Boyden Gray, has become part of the Bush-Cheney team in the Florida Election Fraud Fiasco.

"Bush-Cheney's attorney and George Bush Sr.'s personal attorney, as well as presidential attorney C. Boyden Gray is the famous 'Charles Smith' of the October Surprise scandal," he writes.

October Surprise was the name given to a scheme which corrupted the 1980 presidential election by bribing the Iranians who held 52 American prisoners hostage Teheran.

The intent of this successful plot was to alter the presidential election -- to bring about the defeat of President Jimmy Carter and to elect the Reagan-Bush ticket by withholding the release of the Amerfican hostages until after the election.

"Gray's prominent facial feature, i.e., his big nose, was remembered by hotel clerks in Paris and Madrid, and it led to the busting open of the October Surprise Scandal," writes Martin.

"Gray went along with George Bush Sr. and others to those meetings in Paris and Madrid in 1980 with Iranian officials."

In other words, Gray, who was part of the October Surprise criminal conspiracy to steal the 1980 election, is now a Bush-Cheney Team 2000 member.

^===